Partial Backup and Restore
Shawn McGehee discusses partial backups, how they're used, and how to avoid potential problems when restoring from a partial backup.
PASS Data Architecture VC presents Mike Fal on Eating the Elephant: SQL Server Table Partitioning
On Thursday May 17th 12PM noon Central, Mike Fal will discuss "SQL Server's table partitioning gives the DBA tools to manage this beast and support very large tables in a way where index management and data retrieval..."
A Stock Price Correlation Matrix
Building a Stock Price Correlation Matrix Using TVPs, a CROSS JOIN and the PIVOT Function
Amazon RDs and the PaaS formerly known as Azure
Phil Factor welcomes SQL Server support by Amazon RDS, as an alternative to having Microsoft as service provider as well as software provider, via the PaaS formerly known as Azure.
Is Software Engineering Dead?
Software engineering is seen as a dead end career choice, at least by some people. Steve Jones disagrees.
Snapshot Isolation Level in SQL Server - What, Why and How - Part 1
Snapshot isolation levels improve performance but there are some things to take into consideration when using this feature. Arshad Ali discusses what snapshot isolation levels are, their variants, and why and when we should use them.
Guide to MCITP: SQL Server 2008 BI Developer
A guide to the SQL Server 2008 Business Intelligence exams.
Time for Your Career
This week Steve Jones wants to know if you can find time for your professional development. Regularly improving your skills is an important part of your career in technology, and the poll this weeks asks what time you can make for improvement.
The T-SQL of CSV: Comma-Delimited of Errors
Despite the neglect of the basic ODBC drivers over the years, they still afford a neat way of reading from, and writing to, CSV files; and to be able to do so in SQL as if they were tables is somewhat magical. Just to prove it is possible, Phil Factor creates a CSV version of AdventureWorks as a linked server.
Performance Test of New Date Manipulation Functions (SQL Spackle)
Performance test of new SQL 2012 functions DateTimeFromParts and Format
Blogs
Funny Money: #SQLNewBlogger
By Steve Jones
While wandering around the documentation looking for some Question of the Day topics, I...
Why Database AI Agents need Layers?
By Arun Sirpal
Third part in my Ai series with databases. When building AI solutions within the...
Un-Migrating From the Cloud: T-SQL Tuesday #199
By Steve Jones
This month we have a very interesting invitation from Koen Verbeeck. He has hosted...
Forums
How Do the Experts Become Experts?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Do the Experts Become...
Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments Level 4 – Preparing for Production Deployment
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Stairway to Reliable Database Deployments...
Secure Communications
Comments posted to this topic are about the item Secure Communications
Question of the Day
Secure Communications
As of June 2026, what is the best version of TLS to use with SQL Server?
See possible answers